From ‘la guitaromanie’ to the dance-band age

It was the so-called guitaromanie (guitar mania) – so prominent a feature of European musical life from about 1815 until 1840 – that first established the modern six-string guitar in Britain, attracting foreign professionals as performers and teachers and stimulating amateur engagement with it as a vehicle for both instrumental performance and song accompaniment. Part middle- and upper-class fashion statement (notably among women, for whom the guitar’s delicate sound and suitability for domestic use was deemed highly appropriate), part embodiment of Romantic ideals concerning music’s capacity to stimulate the imagination, it gave the instrument a hitherto unknown status.Footnote ¹³ However, from its zenith in the early and mid-1830s interest declined rapidly, not least because of the piano’s ever strengthening position as the essential domestic musical accoutrement for women and girls.Footnote ¹⁴ For much of the period until the 1920s, British guitar culture comprised an extremely modest amateur classical tradition and a minor component within popular music. The instrument featured in some minstrelsy and blackface acts, but was most prominent within the female-dominated amateur mandolin and guitar orchestras that flourished from the mid-1880s and the banjo, mandolin and guitar bands that followed in the next decade.Footnote ¹⁵ The guitar’s generally inferior status within the fretted-instrument world, let alone the larger musical one, was made glaringly apparent by its being comfortably outnumbered within these ensembles and reduced mainly to accompanying its more favoured colleagues.Footnote ¹⁶

The late 1920s and 1930s witnessed a definite improvement in its standing. Interest in the classical guitar was stimulated by increasing visits from European concert artists, above all Segovia, who made a remarkably well-received British début at London’s Aeolian Hall on 7 December 1926 and then returned regularly (and not exclusively to the capital) throughout the period until 1938.Footnote ¹⁷ Although his influence was in its infancy, Segovia was as central to the establishment of the classical guitar as a serious instrument in Britain as he was throughout the world, and with every enthusiast of note recording their debt to him, he was laying key foundations for the post-war resurgence. Again, although it was only a small body and one markedly disinclined to proselytization, the Philharmonic Society of Guitarists (hereafter PSG), founded in 1929 by the Russian émigré Boris Perott (1882–1958), provided British devotees with their first organization specifically dedicated to the classical guitar.Footnote ¹⁸ Interest expanded more significantly in the field of popular music, as is exemplified by a vogue for the Hawaiian steel guitar and the displacement of the banjo as a dance-band rhythm instrument by the plectrum guitar. Again, the genius of the Belgian jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt (1910–53), Bream’s first guitar hero, inspired interest among many existing and potential players. Nevertheless, for all its progress by the early 1940s, the idea that within less than two decades the guitar would become ‘the most popular instrument, at least in Europe and America […] since the piano became the symbol of musical aspiration’ was unimaginable.Footnote ¹⁹

The post-war guitar boom and the re-emergence of the classical guitar

The explosion of interest in the guitar generated by the emergence of skiffle and rock ‘n’ roll from late 1955 rendered it entirely imaginable. Although hard sales data remain elusive, Ivor Mairants, a leading guitarist and guitar dealer, believed there to have been a fivefold increase between 1955 and 1956 alone.Footnote ²⁰ Stories of ‘guitar mania’ became staple narratives in the popular press, with the News of the World reporting that one Manchester dealer had sold 100 instruments in a day and the Daily Mirror claiming: ‘One London firm alone have 2000 unfulfilled orders for guitars [… while] thousands of would-be guitarists here are pestering music shops in vain.’Footnote ²¹ The classical guitar might initially appear far removed from this extraordinary cultural moment, but it could only benefit from the excitement that surrounded the instrument more generally: the London guitar teacher who was ‘inspired by Segovia and skiffle’ was far from unusual.Footnote ²² Understandably, these dramatic developments of the mid-1950s dominate current understanding of guitar history. However, for all their impact, they must not obscure the fact that British guitar culture had already begun to expand significantly in the immediate post-war period as several styles began to attract growing constituencies under the influence of a resourceful recording industry, a buoyant post-war market for live performance and the enthusiastic endorsement of specialist writers.

Three of the emergent forms were of special importance for classical guitar. Flamenco gained a considerable popular following as leading Spanish dance troupes drew capacity audiences to major concert and theatrical venues across the country. Their guitarists were frequently hired to perform in some of London’s more modish cafes and restaurants, where they helped to inspire the growth of what Mairants – himself a convert – saw as one of the most notable areas of increased guitar sales in the early 1950s.Footnote ²³ By 1956, the guitarist Peter Sensier could note drily that one could find ‘flamenco snobs in almost any Espresso coffee-bar’ in the capital.Footnote ²⁴ Folk music, broadly defined, formed another important strand, with the American singer-guitarist Burl Ives attracting huge audiences during his British tour of 1953.Footnote ²⁵ The so-called ‘troubadours’, singer-guitarists who performed both traditional and composed songs drawn from across the globe, provided a more local stimulus. Among the most famous were John Gavall (1919–99), ultimately best known as the pioneer of classical guitar education in British schools, but also a broadcaster and club entertainer; Elton Hayes (1916–2001), a popular recording artist and variety performer from the late 1940s who was probably the first ever British popular entertainer to have been associated exclusively with the guitar; and Victoria Kingsley (1900–2000), a RADA-trained actress, classically trained guitarist and Cambridge University-educated linguist capable of singing in 16 languages.Footnote ²⁶ Although initially enjoying a far narrower reach than flamenco and folk, blues also began to establish a following, with the African American musician Josh White a notable early influence. He first toured Britain in 1950, and his virtuosic playing generated much positive critical attention.Footnote ²⁷

These new currents raised the instrument’s overall profile and helped build communities of guitar enthusiasts who could cross back and forth between different styles. For classical guitar more specifically, these enthusiasts were important in opening pathways to it by sensitizing British guitarists to acoustic, fingerstyle techniques. This is to downplay neither the number of plectrum guitarists featuring in the expanding early 1950s guitarscape (including those using electric instruments), nor their crucial role in the rediscovery of the classical guitar; BMG saw them, indeed, as ‘the most fruitful source of new players of the Spanish guitar’ in the late 1940s.Footnote ²⁸ However, the new interest in fingerstyle expanded possibilities. Although involving not inconsiderable differences in technique and repertoire, flamenco and classical were close enough aesthetically to allow some crossover of both performers and listeners, with many of London’s flamenco venues happily featuring classical players. Inspiration could also flow from less immediately obvious sources. Ives, for example, provided the initial encouragement for Robert Spencer (1932–97), eventually an influential classical guitarist and player of historical fretted instruments more generally, to take up the instrument.Footnote ²⁹

For all this wider activity, the classical guitar revival was ultimately dependent on developments within its own milieu. Technological innovation was significant, with Albert Augustine’s invention of the nylon string in 1946 as an alternative to, and very quickly a replacement for, its gut precursor vital both in defining the moment at which the instrument began to resurface across the western world and in stimulating its subsequent popularity. Virtually unbreakable, stable and losing little if any warmth of tone, nylon strings were by 1950 rapidly becoming an affordable, reliable norm.Footnote ³⁰ Live performance was similarly key. Segovia recommenced British tours in 1947, drawing ever larger and more reverential audiences who from the early 1950s were also able to obtain an increasing body of his LP recordings.Footnote ³¹ Visits from other foreign players, most notably France’s Ida Presti in 1951, reached smaller publics but still helped raise the instrument’s profile. Above all, the immediate post-war period finally saw the first significant steps in the re-establishment of a sustainable indigenous classical guitar culture in which both elite performers and a vigorous community of amateurs eventually could flourish.

Central to this was the sheer hard work of J. L. White’s ‘ardent enthusiasts’, of whom four – Wilfrid Appleby (1892–1987), John W. ‘Jack’ Duarte (1919–2005), Peter Sensier (1918–77) and Terry Usher (1909–69) – were especially important.Footnote ³² Appleby was the only amateur among them, with the others full- or part-time professional dance-band plectrum guitarists in the vanguard of those inspired by Segovia. Although all performed publicly with varying degrees of regularity, their greatest contributions came within the fields of teaching, arrangement (Duarte, alone, would eventually become a notable composer), journalism and administration. The Manchester-based Usher, providing a much needed counterbalance to what was then often a London-centred activity, became a highly influential figure in the north of England; one contemporary noted that in the 1950s ‘there must have been very few orthodox Spanish guitarists north of the Trent who were not pupils of his or pupils of his pupils’.Footnote ³³ At a time when suitable music was rarely available, Usher also helped widen horizons through his arrangements of Bach for guitar duet;Footnote ³⁴ and Sensier’s transcriptions of Byrd, Purcell and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century composers played a similar role. All four men had columns in BMG at various times, offering advice on technique and practical musicianship and helping to mould the tradition of ‘self-help’ tuition crucial to the many players lacking access to specialist teachers.

Appleby was particularly active within the classical guitar’s early administrative structures, although his achievements were mixed. Initially influential within the PSG, his insistent and belligerently argued belief (returned to later in this study) that the classical guitar was the ‘true’ guitar and all others merely ‘novelty’ or ‘debased’ variants led to a messy resignation in 1951 and his founding the rival International Classic Guitar Association.Footnote ³⁵ With or without him, the PSG remained a small organization, focused heavily on London in terms of activity and membership; its eventual renaming as the London Guitar Society (hereafter LGS) in 1959 seems fitting.Footnote ³⁶ Nevertheless, its meetings, monthly bulletin, members’ concerts and well-stocked library of specialist music (Bream’s father was once librarian) gave some shape to the rather inchoate post-war classical guitar world. It also provided crucial practical help both to Bream at the very outset of his career (organizing concerts to showcase his talents, helping to smooth his route into the RCM and providing him with useful financial support) and later to Williams.Footnote ³⁷ Appleby’s International Classic Guitar Association had little function beyond serving as a mechanism for the production of the bi-monthly Guitar News, which, while derided by some for its celebratory and unquestioning approach, was Britain’s only dedicated classical guitar publication.Footnote ³⁸ At a local level, Appleby founded and Usher co-founded, respectively, the Cheltenham and Manchester guitar circles in 1946, and several similar bodies followed, including the Welsh and Liverpool circles (both 1951), the Classic Guitar Society of Glasgow (1954) and the Bristol University Guitar Club (1955).Footnote ³⁹ These were early examples of what became a modest but valuable network of organizations offering an important forum for performance, discussion and sociability for the more ambitious and advanced performers and a conduit for the establishment of the guitar into communities outside London. As such, they quietly helped to embed the instrument in British musical culture.

This nascent guitar tradition was boosted in April 1952 through the establishment by John Williams’s father, Len, of the Spanish Guitar Centre in London’s Soho. Len Williams (1910–87), whose interest in classical guitar stemmed from his friendship with the Italian guitarist and luthier Mario Maccaferri in the 1930s, had recently returned from Australia, where he had emigrated after a career in the pre-war London dance-band world.Footnote ⁴⁰ Combining teaching with the sale of guitars and related equipment, the centre soon garnered some 200 students, both a revealing testament to the already growing interest in the classical guitar, at least in London and the south-east, and a stimulus for it. The centre also encouraged provincial imitation, commencing with the inception of the Bristol Spanish Guitar Centre in 1954 by Michael Watson, a one-time student of the London original.Footnote ⁴¹ At the heart of Len Williams’s decision to return to Britain was the desire to find a European base from which to build the career of his ten-year-old son, John. There could be no better motivating force for British classical guitar than the emergence of outstanding home-grown or home-nurtured talent, and the young John Williams and the slightly older Bream were more than capable of providing it.Footnote ⁴² The playing of Desmond Dupré (1916–74), both as soloist and as accompanist to the countertenor Alfred Deller, had excited much interest in the late 1940s and early 1950s,Footnote ⁴³ but it was the dramatic arrival of Bream (1933–2020) and Williams (b. 1941) that really captured imaginations. The London-born Bream, who had moved from plectrum to Spanish guitar at the age of 11, made his concert début in Cheltenham in 1946, and in the next year appeared on both BBC radio and the corporation’s infant TV network, as well as making his formal London début only two days after his fifteenth birthday.Footnote ⁴⁴ Williams in his turn performed for the PSG in 1952, aged only 11, and played in concerts in both Bristol and Manchester just three years later.Footnote ⁴⁵ There was enormous interest in their progress, symbolized by Bream’s appearance on the cover of BMG as early as 1947. Britain had teenage guitar heroes several years before the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll.

Measuring the classical community

It is impossible to know how many classical guitarists emerged within this second wave of guitaromanie, not least because it is equally impossible to determine exactly what defined one: the instrument’s relative cheapness saw many more bought than actually played with any regularity or measure of competence. Those who saw their playing as serious leisure indulged in it with some purpose, but even so it is impossible accurately to enumerate a pastime largely rooted in individual or small, semi-private group activity and thereby largely hidden from the historical record. Fragmentary numerical data can be found, but they are too scattered and partial to form the basis of detailed analysis. In 1955, The Times claimed the existence of about 10,000 ‘more or less serious’ players, while ten years later the manager of London’s Spanish Guitar Centre stated that it alone had trained about 15,000 ‘competent students’ between 1952 and 1965. Unfortunately, it is unclear how the former estimate was reached, and the latter is unverifiable.Footnote ⁵⁷ Rather than focus on raw numbers, the approach taken here is to establish broad indications of the overall scale and patterns of growth of the key specialist services, especially teaching, which allowed the classical guitar to flourish.

The evidence suggests a substantial growth in the overall number of practitioners, particularly in the 1960s. Again, detailed instrument sales figures are unobtainable, although one well-informed commentator reported a sevenfold increase in classical guitar retail between 1963 and 1968.Footnote ⁵⁸ The rise in the number of guitar-related publications, however, is extremely clear. The appearance of Sharpe’s The Story of the Spanish Guitar in 1954 was an early indication of the instrument’s growing visibility,Footnote ⁵⁹ although in 1957 Clifford Essex still advertised only three tutor books for the instrument in BMG. Just five years later, however, the company informed readers that ‘we have so many tutors for the Spanish Guitar that we have listed them on a separate leaflet’. By November 1963, the magazine could also advertise 22 ‘albums of solos for the Spanish Guitar’, ranging from the Tárrega Album fingered by Luise Walker to arrangements of popular musical standards by Geoffrey Sisley in his Me and my Guitar. Footnote ⁶⁰

Perhaps most telling was the marked increase in the availability of formal tuition. In terms of private teaching, BMG’s advertising listings, although in no sense offering a definitive record, provide useful indicative material. The overall number of individual teachers offering at least some level of classical teaching rose only slightly from 37 in 1951 to 42 in 1961, but doubled during the next decade to reach 89 by 1971. Moreover, the number of dedicated classical specialists had risen from just three in 1951 – Alexis Chesnakov and Sensier in London and Usher in Manchester – to 23 by 1971. Similarly, the number of multi-staffed specialist classical guitar centres advertising their services rose from five in 1961 to 12 by 1971.Footnote ⁶¹ This expansion was paralleled by major developments within the state education sector.Footnote ⁶² Experiments with the guitar in the school classroom began in the early 1950s, but it was the work of Gavall, first as a music teacher in the Midlands and then as music adviser (from 1963 to 1972 senior adviser) to Yorkshire’s West Riding Education Authority, that provided the major catalyst.Footnote ⁶³ Working for an organization with an unusually strong commitment to arts education, he was allowed to create six full-time peripatetic classical guitar tutorships between 1961 and 1966, and to appoint to them musicians of the highest calibre: Gordon Crosskey, his first recruit, was to become professor of classical guitar at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, and one of Britain’s most highly regarded guitar teachers. By 1972 – after which year local authority reorganization dramatically reduced the scheme’s effectiveness – about 1,000 West Riding primary children were taught the classical guitar each week, with older children also able to access Saturday morning adult classes. Gavall’s tireless evangelizing helped lead to provision, admittedly often less well sourced, in a number of other authorities.Footnote ⁶⁴ It is impossible to measure the extent to which these child musicians continued their playing into adulthood, but at the very least the development of school tuition in the 1960s is a further and vital demonstration of the classical guitar’s much enhanced status in Britain and its growing acceptance as a serious instrument.

Most significant of all was the growth of guitar teaching within the local authority adult evening classes that were so prominent within the post-1950 British educational landscape.Footnote ⁶⁵ Adult guitar classes in which a variety of styles were subsumed had existed from the late 1940s, but by the later 1960s demand for specialist classical teaching had grown strongly.Footnote ⁶⁶ The policies adopted by the Inner London Education Authority (hereafter ILEA) demonstrate this powerfully. Although the number of actual classes offered cannot be ascertained, Floodlight, the ILEA’s annual evening class guide, did list all adult education centres where some level of guitar tuition was available. While in 1965–6 only three of the 42 such institutions specifically offered ‘Spanish guitar’, by 1968–9, 23 out of 45 did so, with three more advertising ‘classical guitar’. (The reason for the differentiation is unclear and may well have simply reflected different naming procedures across institutions; by 1974, ‘classical’ had been uniformly adopted as the generic term.) Within three years, Spanish/classical had increased from just 7% of advertised guitar tuition to 57%. Moreover, of the 18 instruments available for study by ILEA adult students, Spanish guitar now stood second only to the piano in terms of level of provision.Footnote ⁶⁷ Judged by this evidence at least, the late 1960s marked the moment when the classical guitar reached entirely new levels of popularity and exposure. Given the relatively generous supply of competent teachers in the capital, London’s provision was probably above average, but classes appeared across the country and could generate high levels of interest; 70 people enrolled for a beginners’ group at one Liverpool centre in 1968.Footnote ⁶⁸

The importance of adult classes lay in their ready availability – in many areas they often provided the only option for tuition – and their extraordinary cheapness. A nine-month session of weekly ILEA classes in 1969 was priced at only £1 15s. at a time when equivalent private individual tuition would have cost about £100.Footnote ⁶⁹ Many critics were justly concerned by ‘evening centre syndrome’, whereby teachers, faced with large bodies of students of varying ability and expectation, had to choose between giving a series of brief and inadequate individual tutorials or teaching whole groups at an often very slow pace.Footnote ⁷⁰ Nevertheless, although many classes were rendered largely ineffective and drop-out rates could be high, the difficulties were not insurmountable, and imaginative ways were often found to engage large numbers in useful activity.Footnote ⁷¹ For all its faults, the evening class represented the main formal educational route to classical guitar and, by bringing it to a large new constituency, was a major force for its popularization.

Class

The social and demographic structure of the classical guitar playing constituency can be categorized broadly as middle-class, male, relatively young and urban. Analysis is once again somewhat hampered by paucity of source material, but with leading amateur and professional performers generally typical of the larger body of practitioners from which they were drawn, their biographical data, combined with other supporting material, provide an instructive way forward. The guitar’s middle-class milieu was obvious from the earlier twentieth century. Among those active from the 1930s and 1940s, Perott was an eminent heart surgeon, Appleby a philatelist, Usher (after a period as a dance-band guitarist and instrument salesman) an assistant town clerk with Manchester Corporation and later the publicity and information officer for the City of Manchester, while Duarte was a research scientist. In terms of the first professional performers, Dupré was an Oxford graduate who worked as a research chemist before going to the RCM, and Spencer was initially a librarian.Footnote ⁷² Bream, the son of a freelance commercial artist, was from a more modest lower-middle-class background, but that appears to have been fairly untypical.Footnote ⁷³

The continuity between the social backgrounds of these pioneers and those taking up the instrument in the 1950s and 1960s is striking. The News Chronicle’s depiction of 1956 guitar mania as comprising ‘young factory workers who want to emulate Lonnie Donegan’ and ‘middle-aged professional men with a yen to be Segovia’ was a little too journalistically neat, but harder evidence does suggest that this categorization of the classical guitar’s class base at least did have some foundation in fact.Footnote ⁷⁴ Chesnakov described his London-based pupils in the earlier post-war period as ‘professional people, intellectual types’, and although he was not necessarily equating occupation and mental disposition with educational level, the prevalence of graduate professionals among the ranks of guitarists was noteworthy.Footnote ⁷⁵ When a teenage Crosskey, himself studying for a maths and physics degree at the Royal College of Science, London, began classes at the Spanish Guitar Centre in 1959, his fellow students included both Julian Andrews, a Cambridge language graduate and later a senior figure in the British Council, and Erasmus Harland, eventually a world-renowned paediatrician.Footnote ⁷⁶ In a revealing comment on social context, Margaret Campbell argued in the late 1960s that ‘in the university towns, the classical guitar is a “natural”’, noting in particular the 50-strong Cambridge University Guitar Society, founded in 1959.Footnote ⁷⁷ Wade was an ex-president, and Malcolm Weller, founder of the Newcastle Classical Guitar Centre and by profession an urban planner and property developer, was another prominent member.Footnote ⁷⁸ Again, Eric Hill and Gerald Garcia, both eventually professional performers, honed their skills while chemistry students at Leeds and Oxford universities respectively.Footnote ⁷⁹ Away from purely university-centred activity, a middle-class social tone still largely prevailed. The six guitar societies active in the London area in the 1960s were all based in relatively prosperous, usually suburban locations, while the secretaries of similar bodies elsewhere in the country also tended to live in suburbia.Footnote ⁸⁰ The founding committee of the Liverpool Classical Guitar Society in 1968 included Brendan McCormack, a publican’s son born in a working-class district of the city, as well as (rather more typically) a university lecturer, a grammar-school teacher and the head of music in a college of education.Footnote ⁸¹

The classical guitar’s growing popularity was sometimes accompanied by narratives stressing its universality, with Usher claiming in 1964 that it was now being ‘played by people in all walks of life from princes to dustmen’,Footnote ⁸² and Campbell entitling her 1968 survey of British guitar ‘Everybody’s Instrument’ (see above, note 58). The 1960s undoubtedly saw some widening of its social base as the result of growing educational opportunities. The lower middle class, always especially strongly represented within the world of adult education, would have been the most likely beneficiary, but working-class students could also be attracted, Crosskey recalling that one regular attender at his local authority class was a corporation truck driver. He also stressed that many of the South Yorkshire pupils in the 1960s were from working-class (especially mining) communities, and they clearly offered the instrument a new constituency, other manifestations of which can occasionally be glimpsed. In 1974, for example, ‘a fitter’ wrote to BMG for advice on protecting his nails while at work, and, of course, his request points up a potentially troublesome practical issue for those in some manual trades.Footnote ⁸³ Future detailed local research may well refine this picture still further and show a wider range of occupation than is recorded here. Nevertheless, claims of universality were actually describing a widening of interest rather more than any fundamental change in the core constituency. The popularization of the classical guitar did not equate to its democratization.

(Re)gendering

The predominance of males within the ranks of classical guitarists is extremely significant, given the extent to which the instrument had so strongly been gendered as feminine. Indeed, in the earlier nineteenth century, its association with the domestic, feminine environment had added powerfully to a wider sense of the guitar as mere appendage to genteel social life and thereby unfitted for the serious demands of the concert platform.Footnote ⁸⁴ To describe the classical guitar world as essentially male is not to deny women’s continued engagement with it. Five of the eight founder members of the Cheltenham Guitar Circle in 1946 were women, as were eight of the 28 PSG members captured in a photograph of 1948.Footnote ⁸⁵ The later sporadic photographic record similarly identifies them as members of, for example, the London Spanish Guitar Centre and a Liverpool evening class in the late 1960s.Footnote ⁸⁶ It is also likely that female participation was increasing by the early 1970s. Although the dataset is small, analysis of the candidates passing the Spanish guitar diplomas offered under the aegis of BMG shows females, probably often teenagers and children, taking 30% of awards in 1966, but fractionally more than 50% by 1971.Footnote ⁸⁷ Nevertheless, women appear to have been a minority for most of the 1950s and 1960s, and were often treated decidedly as such. A cast of exclusively male critics, writers and technical experts infused the classical guitar and the discourses around it with a strong sense of masculine authority. BMG, Guitar News and, at the end of the period, Guitar were invaluable sources of help and inspiration for their readers, but the male voice – not infrequently ponderously disputatious if Appleby or Duarte were in full pomp – was never questioned. More broadly, the instrument was regendered as masculine in a number of ways. The early tribulations of Anthea Gifford, eventually a highly respected concert-hall recitalist, show the extent to which traditional associations had declined by the late 1950s. Her Bristol secondary school initially opposed her studying classical guitar, because, as Gifford recalled, it ‘felt it wasn’t quite ladylike for some reason’. She was able to decline the proffered alternatives of learning the flute and studying the guitar for vocal accompaniment only owing to the strong support of her parents, and she remained the school’s only female pupil, her peers not ‘feel[ing] it was quite their instrument’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Such attitudes were not universal, with the West Riding Education Authority’s scheme actively embracing girls from its inception. They were, however, powerful.

Gifford’s youthful experience aligned quite markedly with other aspects of classical guitar culture. Male players clearly enjoyed a near monopoly on public performance. Although there was no active hostility to women performers (Presti was greeted with critical adulation whenever she played in Britain), few British players had the chance to emulate Gifford, who was the only major female professional British concert performer before the early 1970s.Footnote ⁸⁹ This is perhaps not unexpected given that, even in the more sympathetic environment of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, the few aspiring concert artists were mostly male. More surprisingly, a similar situation appertained in the field of amateur performance, a territory once reasonably open to females through the medium of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society soirées and charity concerts.Footnote ⁹⁰ Restriction of opportunity was certainly evident within the LGS in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Women players were not entirely unknown at the society’s monthly concerts, with June Pierce (a student of Len Williams, frequently his duet partner and eventually his third wife) and Stella McKenzie (a London-based teacher and LGS secretary) reasonably regular participants. However, of the 21 individuals playing at LGS events between January 1961 and January 1962, only six were women, and of these only two were ‘straight’ classical guitarists, the others being vocalists using guitar accompaniment. Analysis of programme structures at the Cheltenham, Purley and Hampstead societies in the 1960s tells a similar story.Footnote ⁹¹

Women were also under-represented in classical guitar teaching. Kramer’s critical role in conservatoire-based education has been noted; her eventual successor at the Guildhall School of Music in London, the Australian Blanche Munro, had been appointed as professor at the London College of Music in 1959; and Kathleen Lamb took up a post at the Birmingham School of Music in 1960.Footnote ⁹² However, these were prestigious exceptions to the rule. Just six of the 89 individual teachers advertising in BMG in 1971 were women, and while the multi-staffed guitar centres and studios often employed them (Sadie Bishop, Lorna Gray, McKenzie and Pierce all worked with Len Williams in the 1950s), this hardly altered the situation. Indeed, as late as 1990 women still comprised only some 15% of teachers advertising in the period’s major specialist magazine.Footnote ⁹³ This is all the more noteworthy given that music teaching was very much a female stronghold from the mid-nineteenth century: 1951 is the last occasion on which it is possible to identify music teachers as a distinct group within the official government census returns, and women made up some 75% of their total number.Footnote ⁹⁴ This dominance did not translate into the guitar world.

The regendering of the instrument in the post-war period was partially a function of its extremely marginal position in the first half of the twentieth century. By the 1950s the guitar was unfamiliar to most people, and Gifford wondered whether her teachers, unaware of its history, simply overestimated the degree of physical strength required to play it.Footnote ⁹⁵ Practicalities, albeit culturally constructed, added further difficulty. The musicologist Mavis Bayton has acknowledged that the need to cut the long fingernails that were (in her phrase) ‘one of the norms of traditional “femininity”’ was a barrier to guitar playing of any sort, and the peculiar requirement of the classical guitarist to have nails short on the left hand but kept longer on the right may have presented particular fashion problems.Footnote ⁹⁶ Two wider factors, however, had the greatest impact. The popularity of the electric guitar from the mid-1950s, with its connotations of aggressive male sexuality derived from both playing style and the music associated with it, helped to code the guitar per se as masculine. Within the classical field specifically, as the instrument gained an ever higher public status, it shed any remnant of its subordinate position as a woman’s preserve and became an entirely acceptable vehicle for male musical aspiration.

Age

The overall age profile of the British classical guitar community at any one time was always mixed. A substantial body of practitioners began in middle age and beyond. Appleby was in his late forties when he took it up; one London-based adult education teacher recorded a typical age range in his classes of 16–60; and BMG ran a long-running technical column by James O’Brien that declared itself to be aimed at the self-taught player who was ‘getting a little long in the tooth’.Footnote ⁹⁷ While hardly a term of sociological precision, O’Brien’s phrase usefully drew attention to the fact that the guitar could be found later in life, and commitment to it was often long-lasting. However, the claim by London’s Spanish Guitar Centre in 1965 that most of its 300 students were ‘between 18 and 30’ probably best identifies the age group that was largely responsible for the instrument’s new-found popularity.Footnote ⁹⁸ Most of the guitarists discussed above in relation to the guitar’s social constituency had begun playing in their teens and early twenties, and contemporary discussion of the audience for guitar concerts, generally assumed (in the words of one critic) to include many ‘budding guitarists’, similarly stressed the centrality of this age group.Footnote ⁹⁹ Wigmore Hall recitals by Bream in 1956 and 1957 were ‘packed’ respectively ‘largely by his own generation’ and by ‘a big audience of young enthusiasts and aspirants’; Williams drew a following that was ‘predominantly young [although] not exclusively so’ to Cheltenham in 1967; and the local guitarist and lutenist Rod Willmott attracted ‘a sizeable audience, mostly of young people’ to a Liverpool concert in the same year.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This youthful cohort made the classical guitar feel, as it did in so many other ways, decidedly modern.

Geography

While classical guitarists could be found anywhere in the country and in any type of community, the ready availability of teachers, instrument dealers, fellow enthusiasts and live performances inevitably made cities, larger towns and their satellite communities the major sites of activity. London, long the nation’s cultural capital, unsurprisingly contained the largest single body of amateur performers. As well as providing the headquarters of the PSG/LGS and spawning at least another six local societies, it enjoyed a scale of teaching provision that testified to high levels of local demand. In terms of private tuition, in 1971 London, in combination with its hinterland of Essex, Kent, Middlesex and Surrey, was home to 40% of all individual teachers advertising in BMG, as well as housing several specialist studios: the Spanish Guitar Centre alone claimed 400 pupils.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Following the establishment of the Bristol Spanish Guitar Centre, similar facilities opened in a number of major regional centres including Cardiff, Leicester, Newcastle and Nottingham.Footnote ¹⁰² Other apparently vigorous guitar communities can be identified, with towns in the immediate vicinity of Manchester providing 38 of the 75 recipients of BMG diplomas in 1971, of which Bolton alone produced 13.Footnote ¹⁰³ These figures obviously reflect the enthusiasm of local teachers for this particular exam as much as they capture the exact geography of the guitar world, but they do also show that powerful pockets of interest could emerge in provincial society. Rural areas were not naturally conducive environments, with prospective performers almost entirely dependent on self-tuition (admittedly a common element for most guitarists at some stage of their practice) unless local educational policy proved unusually enlightened.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Much of Wade’s early teaching career was centred on Holland County Music School in Boston, Lincolnshire, from where he was able to build a substantial body of both child and adult pupils in local market towns and villages, but few authorities could match such efforts, or even tried to do so.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The virtuoso next door: displays of the extraordinary and discourses of the ordinary

The significant enhancement of the classical guitar’s audibility and visibility would simply not have occurred without the existence of virtuosic concert performers perfectly fitted to contemporary cultural tastes and habits. Although foreign artists – above all Segovia – were important figures, it was Bream and Williams who had the seminal roles. From the later 1950s, Bream became a highly familiar figure to fans of British classical music. Described by the critic Alec Robertson in 1961 ‘as the most gifted of our young instrumentalists’, he became the recipient of an OBE three years later, aged just 30.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ His status was much enhanced by his involvement (as lute soloist, ensemble player and accompanist) in the emerging British early music movement, which placed him at the core of a prestigious cultural project; his work with the tenor Peter Pears and with the Julian Bream Consort, which he founded in 1960, was especially important.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Recitals on the BBC Third Programme were frequent, and in 1962 Bream featured on the influential BBC TV arts programme Monitor. Footnote ¹¹¹ Williams’s career took similar shape as the 1960s unfolded. Most important of all, both were willing and able to penetrate more popular arenas. In 1961, Bream was chosen as a ‘castaway’ on BBC radio’s Desert Island Discs, an accolade which effectively granted him the status of a household name.Footnote ¹¹² This was underlined by his appointment in 1963–4 – alongside Richard Attenborough, then one of the country’s best-known actors, and the composer Malcolm Arnold – as a presenter of BBC television’s Gala Performance, a classical music showcase aimed at prime-time audiences.Footnote ¹¹³ Williams’s appearances on the Val Doonican Show, a programme attracting some 20 million viewers, have already been noted, and in 1968 his popularity was made manifest by CBS’s decision to make his LP John Williams Plays Two Guitar Concertos (recorded with the English Chamber Orchestra) one of only three classical albums among the 21 ‘great CBS releases’ named in their popular press advertising campaign: his companions in the overall list included Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand and Johnny Cash.Footnote ¹¹⁴ He was keeping impressive company.

The popularity of the classical guitar’s leading performers and the positive image they created for the instrument more widely was ultimately rooted in an awed appreciation of their virtuosity. At the time when the guitar’s role as the key dynamic within popular music gave it great kudos, classical performers stood at the pinnacle of a generally acknowledged hierarchy of guitar styles. This was often crudely expressed in terms of a polarity pitting the ‘pure’ classical guitar against other ‘corrupt’ versions. The Times’s acid observation in 1959 that Segovia ‘made no concession to the idea of the guitar as an instrument to be thrummed by the musically illiterate’ typified the trope.Footnote ¹¹⁵ It was not solely the preserve of the broadsheet press; discussing Bream’s appearance on Monitor in 1962, the popular Sunday title The People surmised that, ‘Youngsters in the modern guitar-plucking mode are hardly likely to leave the coffee bars to look at BBC Monitor tonight. All I can say is they ought to – just to hear the “square” who is about the world’s top guitarist and gets good money for it.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ Four years later, the Reading Evening Post described Bream as ‘one of the most popular musicians in England. Not surprisingly, he plays the guitar. But unlike many of his younger and more highly charged colleagues, Bream has a wide-ranging talent.’Footnote ¹¹⁷

While performers and fans of guitar-driven popular music genres were hardly likely to accept such value judgments, they were more than willing to acknowledge and celebrate the levels of virtuosity that classical players could bring forth. Indeed, particularly before the late 1960s, by which time outstanding rock and folk musicians were emerging in significant number, classical players had the most plausible claim to virtuoso status. This is not to deny the earlier existence of highly skilled performers in other fields including Hank Marvin (b. 1941) in British pop music and leading jazz players such as the Americans Charlie Byrd (1925–99), Jim Hall (1930–2013), Barney Kessell (1923–2004) and Wes Montgomery (1923–68), although these were less well known to mass audiences.Footnote ¹¹⁸ However, it was the pre-eminent classical players who so often became iconic figures. In November 1963, the Beatles’ George Harrison was reported to be enormously disappointed that tour commitments rendered him unable to see his ‘idol’ Segovia at a forthcoming Liverpool concert, and to have arranged for the maestro to sign a programme for him. While a certain promotional artifice might lurk here, the sentiment was almost certainly genuine: a local journalist commented on the number of ‘Beat’ guitarists present, ‘listening and watching raptly’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Students from an Essex technical college, ‘mostly ex-secondary modern school printers’, were taken to see Bream as part of a liberal arts programme and were described as ‘astounded by the sheer skill of a man who could play a tune and an accompaniment on a guitar at the same time’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Similarly, members of a Midlands beat group were impressed by the lute, guitar and pandura work of Robert Spencer, terming him ‘a great player’.Footnote ¹²¹ Bream’s name especially became a popular cultural synonym for the virtuoso guitarist, with one local newspaper citing a performer cheerfully admitting that he was ‘no Julian Bream’ and another previewing an instructional TV programme by questioning whether viewers ‘ever envied Julian Bream and the way he handles a guitar’.Footnote ¹²² Close association with technical skill and virtuosity could also earn the classical guitar high standing in the hands of lesser-known players and in unexpected locations. John Zaradin, one of the Royal Manchester College of Music’s first guitar graduates under his birth name of Jack Tetlow, made his London recital début in 1968 having previously performed in the cabaret clubs of northern England as one half of a classical guitar and violin duo. In April 1968, he won the ‘top instrumentalist’ category in Granada TV’s Firstimers talent competition, playing in what one reviewer called ‘Julian Bream style’.Footnote ¹²³ Again, one folk musician reportedly received ‘thunderous applause’ for the classical solos he sometimes offered at Middlesbrough Folk Club in the later 1960s.Footnote ¹²⁴

Wider acceptance of leading classical players was made easier by their embrace within the media discourses of approachability and ordinariness that the cultural theorist Richard Dyer has identified as key to the construction of star quality.Footnote ¹²⁵ Potential depictions of them as precious elite musicians playing an esoteric instrument were removed by their becoming, as in the Liverpool Echo’s description of Segovia, ‘modest genius[es]’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Bream was a particular beneficiary of such representation, a process rendered straightforward by his unquestionable possession of the desired qualities in relation to both social background and personality. In an early major press profile, the News Chronicle was quick to identify him as a ‘Battersea-born council schoolboy’ with an accent which was ‘pleasantly and uncompromisingly London’ and as someone who ‘may not fit the conventional picture of a prominent musical executant’; and a northern regional paper took pleasure in finding nothing ‘high-hat or upstage’ about him.Footnote ¹²⁷ That approachability was central to his appointment as a presenter on Gala Performance, on which he was praised by one critic for the ‘off-hand, easy-going scholarship that makes his pronouncements not only stimulating but unusually fascinating’.Footnote ¹²⁸ From the late 1960s, Williams made his distinctive contribution to the process of familiarization through his ever more informal concert dress code, fashionably long hair and ease of direct communication with audiences.

Classical guitar and modern living

Alongside the promise of skilful display, the classical guitar also offered a sound that increasingly came to be associated with certain currents of fashionable modernity. It undoubtedly benefited from the excitement that surrounded the guitar more generally, but its particular modishness stemmed from its own capacity to suggest new possibilities of consumption and lifestyle. In one important sense, ‘Spanish’ was perhaps a more apposite label than ‘classic’ or ‘classical’. The period from the early 1950s witnessed the beginnings of mass tourism from Britain to Spain: visitor numbers rose from just 150,000 in 1950 to 624,000 in 1960 and 1.36 million by 1965. Mairants argued that such holidays had ‘brought a demand for the romantic music of Sunny Spain’, and although this comment referred mainly to enhanced interest in flamenco, the classical guitar undoubtedly gained from the relationship between what was perceived as Spain’s ‘national’ instrument and newly available holiday pleasures.Footnote ¹²⁹ One provincial critic celebrated ‘the languors and smouldering passions’ so fully evoked in Spanish guitar works,Footnote ¹³⁰ while another described the opening bars of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez as ‘full of sunshine, flamenco and a hint of the bull-ring’.Footnote ¹³¹ If blues and rock guitar channelled various relationships between Britain and an imagined USA, their classical counterpart facilitated an exotic connection with a location rather nearer home.

The vogue for things Spanish also helps to account for the growing employment of guitarists in London bars and restaurants. Crucially, these venues, frequently advertising in society magazines such as The Tatler and The Sketch, were largely patronized by a middle-class clientele and located either in Soho, held within the national imagination to be both ‘a Bohemian oasis’ and ‘a sophisticated component of elite metropolitan leisure’, or in other fashionable parts of London such as Chelsea, Kensington and Hampstead.Footnote ¹³² Their adoption of the guitar therefore gave the instrument a new cachet. Although Juan Teijeiro’s playlist at Chelsea’s Scholar Gypsy restaurant in the early 1960s was reported to comprise ‘all the gems from the guitarist’s repertory’, including Isaac Albéniz’s Granada, Francisco Tárrega’s Capricho árabe and pieces by J. S. Bach and Luis de Milán, the power of the guitar in such a setting lay not so much in its music, which was often largely ‘background’, but in its appropriation as a symbol of progressive urban life.Footnote ¹³³ The night-time economy proved the major avenue for such demonstrations of fashionability, although they could spill into other arenas, as when Williams was contracted to play at the modish London furniture company Heal & Son in April 1966.Footnote ¹³⁴ For a far smaller but still significant number, the guitar also came to symbolize aspects of contemporary radical political culture. Len Williams’s Marxist views and love of political debate were well known and often occupied much of his students’ time. His son, in turn, although in no sense doctrinaire, became heavily involved in a variety of progressive causes, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and Amnesty International. His sensibilities appear to have been widely shared, at least within sections of the capital’s guitar community, the LGS donating all door receipts from its monthly concert to CND in June 1959.Footnote ¹³⁵ Such associations did not appeal to all the classical guitar’s exponents, but they added a potent extramusical attraction for some.

Subcultural pleasures and the search for cultural value

While amateur performers shared many of these enjoyments, the rewards of actually playing were inevitably richer and more varied. At its most fundamental, the classical guitar was quite simply a specialist hobby not dissimilar to the many home-based, often male leisure pursuits, such as winemaking, model-railway building, stamp collecting, photography and (most popular of all) do-it-yourself, which flourished in the post-war age.Footnote ¹³⁶ Playing was often a private activity carried out in a bedroom, a spare room, a kitchen or wherever the participant found space and supposedly suitable acoustics, bringing with it the benefits intrinsic to any hobbyist. These might range from the acting out of enjoyable fantasies – many aspirants will have momentarily ‘become’ Segovia, Presti, Bream or Williams – to the more prosaic satisfactions of filling spare time enjoyably and luxuriating in the small pleasures derived from specialist knowledge and interests. Like so many of the activities noted above, playing the guitar undoubtedly offered the chance of male escape from the confines of a post-war domestic environment in which families, especially husbands and wives, were expected to spend far more time in each other’s company as aspirations towards a home-centred leisure were increasingly realized by changes in the nature of housing.Footnote ¹³⁷ It would be valuable to explore women’s utilization (or otherwise) of the instrument’s potential as a vehicle for domestic independence, but given their minority position within the amateur guitar community for much of the period, such strategies were probably destined to be exercised mainly within the masculine domain.

Beyond these generic attractions, a key appeal of the classical guitar was the opportunity afforded for demonstration of cultural discernment and sophistication. For a minority, adopting it became an overt act of cultural elitism demonstrating a self-attributed intellectual connoisseurship that lifted them above other types of guitarist and, by implication, mainstream culture more generally. In an unflattering review of Sharpe’s The Story of the Spanish Guitar, Appleby recorded with icy contempt that ‘the author is the editor of a fretted-instrument magazine and his name is associated with an Hawaiian guitar band’, while his obituary of Usher noted that his ‘considerable part in the revival of the classic guitar’ came ‘in spite of his former association with the plectrum guitar’.Footnote ¹³⁸ In a statement that overlaid racial connotations onto a sense of intellectual superiority, his advice to Duarte when he saw him obtaining certain awkward bass notes with his left-hand thumb was to cease ‘nigger-thumbing’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Ronald Simpson, Appleby’s close associate in the International Classic Guitar Association, challenged Gavall’s observation that the guitar might be highly effective in the accompaniment of community singing, opining: ‘It is strange that an exponent of the classic guitar should make such statements.’Footnote ¹⁴⁰

These were extreme attitudes, however. More open-minded advocates also saw classical as the ‘true’ guitar in the sense of its offering the greatest musical rewards, but did so from a far more understanding and generous stance towards guitarists from other traditions: Usher and Duarte, for example, saw such forms not as ‘debased’, but as valuable only in limited and specific contexts.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Throughout the period, players crossed back and forth between genres, and boundaries between the many different guitar subcultures were always porous.Footnote ¹⁴² Even the highly conservative PSG was willing to welcome the Trinidadian calypso star Lord Beginner onto its concert programme in 1952 (Bream and Williams were on the same bill),Footnote ¹⁴³ while in 1961 the LGS featured the pioneering traditional folk singer and guitarist Martin Carthy and praised his ‘hypnotic accompaniments that far exceeded the outworn three-chord formulae’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Nevertheless, wittingly or otherwise, choosing the classical guitar frequently did imply a search for a certain form of self-realization alert to new trends, distinguishing the player from the more general run of guitarists and exhibiting disciplined, specialist cultural enterprise. Although the relationship between specific social classes and the pursuit of particular types of cultural capital must not be oversimplified, the instrument’s appeal to the well-educated middle classes so plentiful among its exponents is understandable.

The classical guitar’s intellectual symbolism was, nevertheless, always restricted by its categorization, established from at least the early nineteenth century as ‘middlebrow’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The term was not generally used, but there is no doubt that while the music of classical guitar was deemed far superior to the ‘thrumming of the musically illiterate’, it stood somewhat outside the ‘great’ tradition of art music. Critics tended to admire classical guitarists rather more than their instrument and what they played upon it. In 1962 the jazz critic Spike Hughes described the repertoire as consisting of ‘one or two not very distinguished modern concertos, a few transcriptions of Bach, and an endless number of Spanish pieces which all sound alike’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Although Hughes was operating outside his expert territory and writing with knowing exaggeration, he captured a common theme. Several years earlier, the Manchester Guardian’s Colin Mason, always rather lukewarm in his assessment of the instrument, had argued that classical guitar music was often ‘of slight musical value, and if played as background music in a “Spanish” restaurant would contribute unobtrusively to our pleasure without distracting our attention from getting the last mouthful of our lobster’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ 20 years later, and despite the guitar’s far higher profile by then, The Times’s critic Stephen Walsh echoed these sentiments when observing of a concert by Bream and Williams that, ‘At its best the music glittered like snow in the sun and left as much trace.’Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Some of the most stringent criticism was levelled at the guitar’s canonical late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century composers. Items by Fernando Sor (1778–1839), often proudly referred to within the guitar world as ‘the Beethoven of the guitar’, were variously deemed ‘on the dull side’, possessed of a ‘certain charm […] yet long outstay[ing their] welcome’ and ‘trite’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Again, Lágrima, by the highly influential Tárrega (1852–1909), a much-loved item comfortably within the capacity of most amateurs, was described in one record review as ‘an empty trifle’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

As with all specialist publics, however, there was satisfaction to be derived from outsider status, and these critiques could be appropriated and reworked by guitarists in order to underline their self-image as fortunate cognoscenti in a world with its own pantheon of composers and performers existing happily beyond what some perceived to be ‘the gaze of a hostile and indifferent environment’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ In a lacerating dismissal of Stephen Dodgson’s Concerto no. 1 for Guitar and Orchestra (1956) that deemed it ‘timid, idealess and memorable only for its irritating manners’, the critic Gerald Larner noted the audience’s fervent response to the work and took this as evidence of ‘how much triviality the guitar audience (a race apart) will put up with for the sake of the familiar sound’.Footnote ¹⁵² Although the dismissive tone would have been unappreciated, their depiction as a ‘race apart’ would have resonated with many enthusiasts. Defending the guitar against criticism of its limited possibilities, Usher argued that it was ‘the guitar’s expressiveness, not its music, which fills the concert halls with guitar-lovers’.Footnote ¹⁵³ In a thoughtful discussion of Carcassi, Carulli, Giuliani, Sor and others who had laid the ‘cornerstone’ of the modern repertoire, Wade acknowledged not only their weaknesses but also their achievements and the contemporary cultural value they imparted. They provided, he argued, ‘a kind of secret society into which guitarists are quickly initiated, mainly through the rituals of playing through studies, pieces and tutors by these gentlemen. For hundreds of beginners as well as more professional performers, the work of these men may have taken up many hours of a lifetime.’Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The sound of the classical guitar and the specialist music that its devotees worked so hard to execute upon it were what mattered; armed with this subcultural mentality, amateur classical guitarists claimed the pursuit of the middlebrow as a badge of honour.

For some commentators within the guitar world, there was concern that this often inward-looking culture could lead to playing the guitar becoming a specialist pastime in which music making was no longer the defining element. Writing in 1963, Sensier observed: ‘I have realised for a long time that the majority of those who take up the guitar take it up as a hobby – and what is more, it is learning the guitar, not playing the guitar, that is their hobby: and it is playing the guitar and not playing music on the guitar that is their main hobby.’Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Continuing in this vein, he was also struck by a frequently demonstrated limited general musical knowledge, not least a widespread inability to sight-read. In the next decade, Wade similarly stressed this tendency to introspection, claiming that classical guitarists ‘more perhaps than other instrumentalists, often suffer a kind of musical myopia, finding it difficult to relate what they are attempting to do with the broader horizons of music’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ An idiosyncratic fixation with the instrument was similarly identified. Gifford described the classical guitar as ‘very much an obsessive instrument. I know a lot of lovely people who spend all their evenings practising for hours and hours. I can’t think of any [other] instrument that amateurs would do this with.’Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Wade, in his turn, commented on the regularity with which ‘the guitar becomes for the adult beginner a wild obsession’, involving excessive practice regimes and consequent neglect of other aspects of their life.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

The classical guitar and amateur music

While some exaggeration was doubtless employed in order to provoke a change in attitudes, such observations underline the extent to which classical guitar playing stood outside the wider field of amateur music-making. All of its branches, were, like the guitar, ultimately hobbies, and all shared something of its narrowness and specialist focus: an Arts Council researcher in eastern England in the 1960s noted that within the 19 musical societies examined, only the ‘occasional individual’ showed ‘the least interest in the activities of the others’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ What distinguished the guitar, however, was its departure from standard modes of operation. Most amateur musical pursuits have prioritized all or most of the following: the casting of a chosen field as a ‘movement’ in the sense of it being a force for the public good; public performance, albeit sometimes only within a familial setting; competition against like-minded organizations or individuals, quite often given extra purchase by participants seeing themselves as representatives of local and regional communities; and (to a lesser extent) the gaining of qualifications.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

These elements had only the most limited place within guitar culture. At least in institutional terms, its sense of shared fellowship and common aim was well below the level experienced in a self-consciously collective arena such as brass banding, where, as one contemporary commentator observed, ‘The first thing they tell you is that this is the Brass Band Movement.’Footnote ¹⁶¹ As noted, the PSG was only ever a small and far from evangelical organization, and the local guitar circles, of which there were about 30 by the late 1960s, tended to serve the needs of highly committed individuals rather than the playing community more generally. Public performance was beyond the ambition of all but a handful of players, and although the number of competitions undoubtedly grew considerably, with more than 80 music festivals offering a classical guitar category by 1969, entry was similarly inconceivable for the vast majority.Footnote ¹⁶² Finally, formal qualifications were both hard to obtain, with graded exams introduced only in 1967 and initially only for higher grades, and little sought. Although the number of registered ABRSM candidates rose from 67 in 1967 to 1,700 in 1975 and 3,373 by 1983, the last figure represented just 1% of all the board’s examinees. BMG Spanish guitar diplomas had been available for much longer, but (as seen earlier) attracted extremely small numbers and were eventually withdrawn in the mid-1970s.Footnote ¹⁶³

Much of this distinctiveness flowed simply from the classical guitar being a specialist solo instrument that was, by common consent, relatively easy to start upon but extremely difficult to master. As James O’Brien openly acknowledged in BMG, ‘There must be thousands of guitarists who just have not the ability to play really well, who are never good enough to appear in public […] They play for themselves and their guitarist friends.’Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Even exposure within the safe confines of the specialist community could provoke anxiety: Duarte was struck by the extreme nervousness often displayed by adult players within his guitar classes.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Prioritizing personal fulfilment above any wider sense of mission or purpose, classical guitarists never needed to develop the organizational infrastructure and accompanying mentalities more commonly encountered elsewhere within amateur music. Amateur performers certainly derived great personal satisfaction from their endeavours, some becoming genuinely talented musicians, and collectively they played a critical role in elevating the place of their instrument within British musical life. If obsession it was, it was worthwhile. However ‘cooped up in [their] cold little attic’ (in Sensier’s teasing words) and lacking the discipline imposed by a looming calendar of competitions, concerts or examinations, guitarists were frequently solo instrumentalists in more senses than they realized.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Examination of the classical guitar’s place in ensuing decades is another task entirely, but it is evident that its penetration of the national culture could not continue at its earlier level. The pattern of adult teaching in London is instructive. By the mid-1970s, the dramatic growth of interest in folk music meant that ‘folk’ guitar was now narrowly the category most commonly offered by the ILEA, suggesting that, although they remained a popular option well into the 1980s, the high point of interest in classical classes had passed.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ There was undeniably still plentiful growth within the classical guitar community. Although both titles sought to serve an international and not merely British market, the founding of the specialist magazine Classical Guitar in 1982 and the revamping of Guitar in the mid-1980s as the classically orientated Guitar International signified health and optimism. Classical Guitar advertised the services of 236 individual teachers in its January 1990 edition and listed 55 guitar circles, both figures suggesting a steady expansion of the numbers of serious amateur players; the supply of conservatoire-trained professionals similarly continued (and continues) unabated. However, this was very much a subculture unable to sustain the wider purchase that it had begun to enjoy, a situation underlined by the fact that while Bream and Williams remained iconic figures, later performers were never able to replicate their position within the national culture; more than two was a crowd. In July 1990, Classical Guitar produced an editorial that, despite a tongue-in-cheek quality, had intriguing echoes of the sentiments expressed by White in 1943. The classical guitar, it argued, was still

Classical guitar had emerged in the third quarter of the twentieth century as an exciting novelty that grew in stature because it resonated with contemporary social and cultural currents. Over the next decades its context and thus its position changed. The long but gradually accelerating decline in funding for music and the arts within school and, especially, adult education dramatically reduced its exposure to important potential constituencies. Shifting fashions saw the guitar lose out to other forms of cultural expression and consumption, not necessarily musical, and a whole series of factors reshaped patterns of middle-class leisure in ways that reduced opportunity: longer working hours and increased male domestic obligations were probably two of the most important. Despite the classical guitar being far more deeply embedded in British musical life than it ever had been, from the late 1970s its public visibility was in decline.